Preparations

Choose your Editor

Icinga 2 can be developed with your favorite editor. Icinga developers prefer these tools:

• vim
• CLion (macOS, Linux)
• MS Visual Studio (Windows)
• Atom

Editors differ on the functionality. The more helpers you get for C++ development, the faster your development workflow will be.

Get to know the architecture

Icinga 2 can run standalone or in distributed environments. It contains a whole lot more than a simple check execution engine.

Read more about it in the Technical Concepts chapter.

Get to know the code

First off, you really need to know C++ and portions of C++11 and the boost libraries. Best is to start with a book or online tutorial to get into the basics. Icinga developers gained their knowledge through studies, training and self-teaching code by trying it out and asking senior developers for guidance.

Here’s a few books we can recommend:

• Accelerated C++: Practical Programming by Example (Andrew Koenig, Barbara E. Moo)
• Effective C++ (Scott Meyers)
• Boost C++ Application Development Cookbook - Second Edition: Recipes to simplify your application development (Antony Polukhin)
• Der C++ Programmierer, German (Ulrich Breymann)
• C++11 programmieren, German (Torsten T. Will)

In addition, it is a good bet to also know SQL when diving into backend development.

• SQL Performance Explained (Markus Winand)

Last but not least, if you are developing on Windows, get to know the internals about services and the Win32 API.